The hexagon (and other shapes) can also be reproduced in the lab with fluids rotating at different angular velocities. It resembles the diocotron instability where vortices make up the corners/angles of the hexagon. The vortices would be a result of the interaction of fluids of different velocities. http://news.sciencemag.org/2010/04/satu ... reated-labInterestingy, they can produce different polygons (triangles, squares etc) by playing with the relative speeds of the fluids.I'm not saying this is is a more likely cause than the diocotron instability (although they look very similar to me), but simply something worth sharing.

I vaguely remember reading something long ago about Saturn's rings forming spirals, like the grooves in a phonograph record. I was reminded of this recently and found the following article in a search:

Naturally, this observation is being attributed to gravity, although the article is strewn with "maybes", "possibles" and "could bes." Before learning of EU, I figured the spiral might be the orbital decay of the particles in Saturn's rings. All the textbooks said the rings were particles of moons torn apart by tidal action from drifting too close.

The entire planet can vibrate like a bell within periods of a few hours... The cause of the vibrations remains unknown.

Mainstream astrophysics explains pulsars as rapidly spinning objects, a notion that became untenable as higher frequencies were discovered. As an electronics tech, I find the EU explanation much more believable. So is it possible the "vibrations" of Saturn are an ad hoc explanation, or does anyone know that such vibrations have been confirmed other than through the circular reasoning that something must be causing the spirals?

Just like earthquakes can be used to study the Earth’s interior, and solar oscillations can be used to study the interior of the sun, these vibrations in Saturn can help scientists figure out the internal structure of the giant planets.

Okay, seismology question here: I've read that probing the deep interior of an object (Earth, Sun or Saturn) by listening to quakes is pure bunk, unless one can control the pulses. In other words, without already knowing something about the interior of an object, how can listening to the object's grunts and groans tell one anything? (Consider the redshift = Doppler effect assumption, or the wacky idea that neutrinos change "flavor" on their way from the Sun—two assumptions don't make a fact.) I read somewhere that the exact location and intensity of a pulse must be known first, like active sonar. Or do we now have "passive sonar" techniques in seismology?

Saturn’s rings act as a seismograph that records these large-scale oscillations, possibly emanating from deep within the planet.

Source/location of pulse unknown, so is the alleged vibration pure conjecture?

Using numerous occultation measurements of the C ring, the researchers were able to piece together dossiers on these unexplained ring features.

If the rings are in motion, can detail (like braiding) be recorded from momentary observations such as occultation? A fast-shutter photograph can make a speeding car appear to be stationary. For example, if a particular ring thread is braided or anything more than a mathematically clean stream, wouldn't occultation recordings show variances that might be interpreted as "vibrations" when they might really be differences in cross section along the thread?

I've read about rings that are braided. Perhaps those are electrical effects, like Birkeland currents or the movements of electrons in a magnetic field? Or am I overzealously seeing EU in everything? I know Birkeland produced Saturn-like rings or toroids with his Terrella.

Other forum threads discuss the recently discovered "particle accelerator" in the Van Allen belts. The Voyager probes found rings around Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. Perhaps Earth has "rings" too, only they are invisible, like a dark mode plasma. Meanwhile, the rings around the other planets are the equivalent to glow mode and arc mode (Saturn) rings, which are highly visible. (Excuse the analogy, I know the other rings are made of macroscopic particles.)

Other forum threads discuss the recently discovered "particle accelerator" in the Van Allen belts. The Voyager probes found rings around Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. Perhaps Earth has "rings" too, only they are invisible, like a dark mode plasma.

Lucy O'Keefe Hancock has a site where she tries to give her father, John A O'Keefe, an ex Goddard department of Theoretics scientist, some exposure with his ideas of a ringed Earth , as his ideas were never really given any serious consideration while he was alive. The variability of the ring density was suggested as the cause of weather variability, as the rings thin and thicken over time, affecting the amount of Solar energy reaching Earth. Links to some interesting papers are available.

Great selection of posts and links. When people are so asleep, that it is very difficult to interest them in learning about space, science, this world, EM, etc., the "mystery hexagon" is one that can get their attention. Also, I use links to the hexagon, that aren't from this site or related sites; they're unsure of us, or even suspicious, but they'll still trust NASA, various academic institutions, and so on. I often use this one:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzL194jiTyY }hexagon on Saturn. 1:47. And this one next:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOiV1RSfMnQ }the bizarre hexagon on Saturn, 1:13. Then, when they're at least paying attention for a second, I'll post: http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2012/11/28/saturns-northern-hot-spot/ }The hexagon at Saturn’s north pole is another example of electrical activity in the Solar System on a tremendous scale. Electricity moves along charged Birkeland current filaments that electrically connect the Sun with its family of planetary bodies. The current energy flows most strongly into the giant gas planets because their charge differential with the Sun is greater than that of their smaller, rocky cousins.

"It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.""Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one.""Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire

Hi Sparky, That seems to be an experiment which has published results analogous to the Saturn hexagon, but doesn't comprise proof of it. The video is still very useful, since it shows that hexagons can be formed in fluids resulting from flow differences, a result that is unexpected to the GP (general public), and which they would tend to disbelieve, at first, but I think could later accept. Also, as one other person already posted, other regular polygons have been formed by fluid rotations or other movements; so once the GP sees that, then they'll find it easier to accept. Since this is America, many member of the GP have been to college, and aren't really stupid, and can change their minds shown enough experiments along the lines of which we've posted here. Same with the electric universe generally; they have been put to sleep by the fairy tales most astronomers believe and repeat about the universe and how it works. I regularly hear the "Stardate" update on the radio, and there they deliberately present astronomy in a fairy-tale-like setting. That's on one of the biggest news-talk radio stations in the Bay Area, KCBS. About 5 million people live there. That's why I have, with Jae Kamel, published our categorized and annotated Lists of links to websites which each show the actions and effects of electromagnetism on our planet and all life on it, as well as NASA's latest updates about, for example, how the plasma flows from the sun regularly "connect" with the earth. I wish they'd use a different word, though, since "connect" reminds me and probably them of the impossible "magnetic reconnection" which mainstream astronomy has been telling to people for years now. Impossible, since they always assert powerful magnetic fields w/o the presence of any electricity or electrical activity. But once any halfway-intelligent reader or viewer is shown enough examples of the ubiquitous actions of electricity and magnetism throughout out world and the universe, they will accept it, and eventually the will see why the famous Heraclitus said "The thunderbolt steers the Universe" some 2500 years ago or so. BTW I once re-watched the geology video which you sent me, and finally did notice the part you'd mentioned, where there is a dog barking, which ruins the soundtrack there for a few minutes. I hadn't heard it the first time, perhaps skipping through the video more quickly to see it in brief. Last Christmas I took some time to re-watch videos when I could take the time to view them completely. It is kind of funny; but I can also see how the dog's barking would have annoyed you, since you made the video. There are other videos I've downloaded, not related to this forum or science, which were partially ruined by that sort of thing. In one video, which is hard to find and somewhat rare, which someone re-uploaded to you tube, there is a man coughing in the background. He must have been sick: he coughed repeatedly and for a long time, making about 10 minutes or more of the video useless, since you couldn't hear what the lecturer was saying. A live recording, made evidently with a single mic. Sometimes, those things just happen. Also, in the geology video, sometimes your statements, or those of others, are too fast; they skip too many steps, for the meaning to be understood by the GP. You men start talking about, for example, large current flows and such and how they account for the geological shapes and features which you are seeing, standing on and surrounded by, and so on, and even though I'm a scientist myself (but not a geologist), I had to stop the video a few times and think about what you all were saying, to make sense of it. Still a good video, real, live, and "miked" in the way available on outdoor, portable equipment, but the GP is spoiled, and would want the audio to be, say, in Dolby II Stereo, and so on. But it would be really useful to have the video redone, with explanatory sections added, between sections, between the various areas you stopped and recorded in, showing diagrams, animations, and such, with explanations added as text to the diagrams or animations, and so on. For myself, I had to do some homework, in order to remember what the normal current flow at the ground surface is on earth today, partly to see how the current flows you described were different, and by what magnitudes. So, I know that the GP needs all of that. If everyone here on Thunderbolts acted like a team, which you were making such a geology video as described, others would be making videos, or links to existing videos, showing how planets exchange plasma flows, and how they equalize the charge differences between themselves when in (astronomically)"close contact" with each other. The GP still thinks that planets and other planet-sized bodies in the solar system, physically crash into each other, since they watch only movies, animations, and cartoons, but not science videos. They don't yet know that such "contacts" are basically impossible in that sense, and that only much smaller bodies, such as asteroids and meteors, actually physically impact a planet, and that even those, usually burn up in the atmosphere, or are exploded by electrical energy, as the recent Russian meteors were. Jone Dae

The GP still thinks that planets and other planet-sized bodies in the solar system, physically crash into each other, since they watch only movies, animations, and cartoons, but not science videos. They don't yet know that such "contacts" are basically impossible in that sense,

Oh no, need to cancel and get a refund from my "Rogue Meteor" Insurance!!

"It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.""Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one.""Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire

"The UVIS images, which are also being analyzed by team associate Aikaterini Radioti at the University of Liege, Belgium, also suggest that one way the bright auroral storms may be produced is by the formation of new connections between magnetic field lines. That process causes storms in the magnetic bubble around Earth. The movie also shows one persistent bright patch of the aurora rotating in lockstep with the orbital position of Saturn's moon Mimas. While previous UVIS images had shown an intermittent auroral bright spot magnetically linked to the moon Enceladus, the new movie suggests another Saturn moon can influence the light show as well."---The new data also give scientists clues to a long-standing mystery about the atmospheres of giant outer planets.

"Scientists have wondered why the high atmospheres of Saturn and other gas giants are heated far beyond what might normally be expected by their distance from the sun," said Sarah Badman, a Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team associate at Lancaster University, England. "By looking at these long sequences of images taken by different instruments, we can discover where the aurora heats the atmosphere as the particles dive into it and how long the cooking occurs."

---

"While we expected to see some red in Saturn's aurora because hydrogen emits some red light when it gets excited, we also knew there could be color variations depending on the energies of the charged particles bombarding the atmosphere and the density of the atmosphere," Dyudina said. "We were thrilled to learn about this colorful display that no one had seen before."

Scientists hope additional Cassini work will illuminate how clouds of charged particles move around the planet as it spins and receives blasts of solar material from the sun.

"The auroras at Saturn are some of the planet's most glamorous features - and there was no escaping NASA's paparazzi-like attention", said Marcia Burton, a Cassini fields and particles scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., who is helping to coordinate these observations. "As we move into the part of the 11-year solar cycle where the sun is sending out more blobs of plasma, we hope to sort out the differences between the effects of solar activity and the internal dynamics of the Saturn system."

Exciting, cooking and bombarding with charged particles of hydrogen...gas into a ....?

Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. -Nikola Tesla -1934

This to me seems like the most likely scenario. I have seen many similar videos reproducing the hexagonal pattern.One thing about hexagons, it is a shape created by tightly packed circles (or maybe equidistant vortices?).

Re/ hexagons made by tightly packed circles, R. Buckminster Fuller, or Bucky, is your expert there; has done and written everything a human can do with that subject. His main works, Synergetics I and II, would have the info you implied a question about, but, I'm unable to give a specific chapter or page right now. But all his work is indexed, ordered, cross-indexed, and so on, so you'd have no trouble finding e.g. closest pack of spheres, and the related geometries there.

While the curtain-like auroras we see at Earth are green at the bottom and red at the top, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has shown us similar curtain-like auroras at Saturn that are red at the bottom and purple at the top. This is how the auroras would look to the human eye.

The color difference occurs because Earth's auroras are dominated by excited nitrogen and oxygen atoms and molecules, and Saturn's auroras are dominated by excited forms of hydrogen. Within each element, colors can differ because of atmospheric density, the levels of the atomic version of an element versus the molecular version, and the energy of impacting electrons.

The illusion from which we are seeking to extricate ourselves is not that constituted by the realm of space and time, but that which comes from failing to know that realm from the standpoint of a higher vision. -L.H.

What has been described by the Newscientist (wondering why they call themseves "new"?)as Weird object hints at Saturn's moon-making skill is followed by the usual mumbling of "gravitational" pulls, tugs, collisions and clumping. Nevertehless, the recent finding by Carl Murray of Queen Mary University of London looks promising:

...Searching through earlier images of the A ring, Murray found 107 images of the distortion taken since June 2012. Dozens of similar patterns, shaped like aircraft propellers, have been spotted deeper in Saturn's A ring, further from the edges. Astronomers think they are the wakes left by moons that are too small to be seen directly that are ploughing through the rings. Murray nicknamed the unusual object causing the A-ring distortions Peggy, after his mother-in-law, because he analysed the first sighting on her 80th birthday. Peggy could be a moon in the making tugging at the edge of the A ring, he says.

"We can't see the object, but it's pushing ring material around, which we can see," says Matthew Hedman at the University of Idaho in Moscow, a member of the Cassini imaging team who was not involved in Peggy's discovery.

Unfortunately we may never know the object's true fate. Murray hasn't found the bright spot in later images of the A ring, and it is possible the nascent clump was destroyed in a collision. But it is equally likely that it became a moon that has since moved too far from the ring to be noticeable. Peggy would be less than a kilometre wide, so if it has escaped from the A ring it is probably too tiny for Cassini's cameras to spot...

Here you can see the "clumping" right at the edge of the A ring, left to the moon Prometheus (the bright dot near the outermost F ring):

And here's a zoom in:

As we get nearer and nearer to a real scientific understanding of how planetary rings work and why they are existing at all -- perhaps, we too get better scientific clues of how planets and moons are born.

Saturn’s auroras are caused by the same phenomenon which leads to dramatic auroral displays on Earth, University of Leicester research showImages of Saturn's northern UV auroras available to download at: http://www.dropbox.com/sh/bp544fa5tfzrx4z/AADv5VKW-df09FH_58efbw10aUniversity of Leicester researchers have captured stunning images of Saturn’s auroras as the planet’s magnetic field is battered by charged particles from the Sun.The team’s findings provide a “smoking gun” for the theory that Saturn’s auroral displays are often caused by the dramatic collapse of its “magnetic tail”.Just like comets, planets such as Saturn and the Earth have a “tail” – known as the magnetotail – that is made up of electrified gas from the Sun and flows out in the planet’s wake.When a particularly strong burst of particles from the Sun hits Saturn, it can cause the magnetotail to collapse, with the ensuing disturbance of the planet’s magnetic field resulting in spectacular auroral displays. A very similar process happens here on Earth.

Dynamic auroral storms on Saturn as observed by the Hubble Space Telescope

Spectacular far ultraviolet (FUV) auroral storms have been previously observed on Saturn using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), consisting of a considerable brightening and poleward expansion of the aurora on the dawnside, resulting in a factor of ∼2–3 increase in total emitted FUV power [Prangé et al., 2004; Crary et al., 2005; Clarke et al., 2005; Grodent et al., 2005; Clarke et al., 2009]. This morphology has been interpreted theoretically as a manifestation of compression-induced tail reconnection [Cowley et al., 2005], and the effect of IMF direction has also been shown to be a significant factor in controlling the radius of the auroral oval [Belenkaya et al., 2011]. In addition, Jackman et al. [2013] related small-scale auroral blobs observed on the nightside using the Cassini Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) to field-aligned currents associated with tail reconnection bursts, and recently the latitude of the poleward boundary of the auroral emission has been discussed in terms of unbalanced dayside and nightside reconnection [Badman et al., 2005, 2013]. A somewhat different auroral enhancement was discussed by Mitchell et al. [2009], who identified a corotating patch of emission equatorward of the main oval with filamentary field-aligned currents associated with an energetic neutral atom (ENA) enhancement produced by an earlier interval of tail reconnection. However, the dynamics of Saturn's storm time auroral morphology have not heretofore been discussed. In this paper we present HST observations obtained in April/May 2013, which capture significant evolution of the auroral morphology during two auroral storms observed on days 95 and 140, and we identify auroral forms with poleward boundary intensifications and the upward continuity current flowing into the trailing region of a partial ring current, respectively.

The illusion from which we are seeking to extricate ourselves is not that constituted by the realm of space and time, but that which comes from failing to know that realm from the standpoint of a higher vision. -L.H.

The new analysis of the data shows that Cassini was magnetically connected to the surface of Hyperion for a brief period, which enabled it to be bathed in a beam of electrons coming from the moon's surface.

The Cassini data show that a similar process can take place on Hyperion. Due to its interaction with solar UV light and charged particles from Saturn's magnetosphere, the moon's surface may acquire a net electric charge. This is precisely what was found by Cassini's instruments.

Analysis of the CAPS-ELS data indicates that it remotely detected a strongly negative surface potential (-200 volts) on Hyperion, consistent with the predicted electrostatic charge in regions near the moon's terminator – the day-night boundary.

"The large difference in potential between the surface and the spacecraft resulted in a flow of electrons being accelerated from Hyperion toward Cassini," said Tom Nordheim. "It was rather like Cassini receiving a 200 volt electric shock from Hyperion, even though they were over 2000 km apart at the time."

And the beginning of that connect-the-dots moment:

"Our observations show that this is also an important effect at outer planet moons and that we need to take this into account when studying how these moons interact with their environment."

Last edited by nick c on Tue Oct 21, 2014 6:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason:spelling correction to thread title